
<blockquote class='quote-from-book'>	<p><span class='ic'>“</span>In the world of digital type, it is very easy for a designer or compositor with no regard for letters to squish them into cattle trains and ship them to slaughter.”</p>
 </blockquote>
	<p><abbr title="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</abbr> does not offer many opportunities for altering the width or shapes of letters. In fact only the <code>letter-spacing</code> property can be applied at all for this purpose, and that simply changes the width of the letters <span class='bracket'>(</span>but not their shape<span class='bracket'>)</span>. The <code>letter-spacing</code> property can however be particularly destructive. Consider this maltreatment of a&nbsp;heading:</p>

<pre><code>&lt;h2 class="squish"&gt;letterfit&lt;/h2&gt;

h2.squish { letter-spacing: -0.1em; }</code></pre>

	<p>Resulting&nbsp;in:</p>

	<div class="ex2-1-9 example">Letterfit is important</div>

	<p>The result may differentiate itself stylistically from other websites, and that might be fine if the words are not important; legibility is the real loser in this&nbsp;instance.</p>
 